The Pakistani Disease

The bizarro dreams just keep on coming.

I woke up completely drenched in sweat last night and terrified. Jason had gone to a friend's house after I fell asleep (remember, I sleep during the day time thanks to my job), and I actually had to call him, feeling every bit the meak, needy pregnant girl I was playing, and ask him if he would come home soon.

There's just something about nightmares, even after you've pinched yourself and woken up, that seem so permeatingly frightening and real in the moments directly after, no matter how silly the contents.

I laid in my sweat puddle for a full half an hour before Jason walked through the bedroom door (I ask too much of him-- in one of the rare instances he gets to sit with a friend, playing guitar and not talking to me about baby this and baby that, he gets summoned home and comes without so much of a groan). He got in bed next to me, stroking my head to help me fall back asleep (at this point I'm two hours way from my 2AM work roll call). And the second he asked me to tell him about it, the dream, only then do I understand how irrational my lasting fear is.

I was about to go into labor and was getting one last ultrasound before the big event. Jason is out of town, so it's only my mom in the room with me.

The tech grows quiet, examining my about-to-be-born child, and stands up quickly to summon the doctor. He enters, and quietly, sadly, tells me my baby has Partisimin-syndrome. I just made that up because what he said, the name, came out in a jumble, in the voice of a Charlie Brown grown-up.

This rare disease, he tells me, is only seen in Pakistani people. This doesn't seem to puzzle him so much, even though I'm not Pakistani. Those are just the facts. I immediately start panicking, aside from the obvious bad news, because Jason is going to think I've cheated on him with a Pakistani person! And I don't even know any Pakistani people! And why do these things always happen to me?

The doctor is flipping through a diagnoses book. "Well, it can apparently also be caused by Propofol, which you took two weeks ago."

Propofol--aka Twilight Sleep--is the drug that killed Michael Jackson. It's what I've been given countless times before a colonoscopy.

The disease, he tells me, is characterized by an extraordinarily enlarged forehead, nose and lips. They show me the ultrasound results, and sure enough, there's my baby, looking like a Pakistani Elephant Man. And, oh yeah, it also causes mental retardation. This is where my breakdown really begins. I'm standing up, screaming, tearing at the walls and shaking the doctor by his shoulders. "HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN??" I'm shouting. "I CAN GET HIM A NOSE JOB, BUT I CAN'T GET HIM A NEW BRAIN! AND I DON'T EVEN KNOW ANY PAKISTANI PEOPLE!!!"

The doctor, the ultrasound tech, my mom, and another nurse-aide are in the room. She's been standing timidly in the corner the whole time during my melt down. The doctor has obviously forbidden her from speaking, as she's some sort of student, not a medical professional. And she's Pakistani.

So I'm standing there screaming, and they're all staring at me with blank expressions. I keep demanding that someone HUG ME, how could no one be hugging me when I'm going through this?? And they all just keep staring.

Suddenly, the quiet Pakistani girl jumps out of the corner in defiance, the doctor giving her the evil eye, and throws her arms around me. She lets me bawl into her arms. And now, only now, I feel a little better. It's going to be ok. Me and my Pakistani Elephant Man baby will be just fine.

The doctor takes me to the bed where I'm supposed to start pushing, and everyone is surrounding me, waiting for the big moment.

Then I woke up. And even with Jason's attempts, I never fell back asleep before work, so I'm now running on four hours.

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The Second Trimester Begins.

Two days into my second trimester, I can finally, officially report that I woke up feeling like myself.

I didn't want to throw up or go immediately back to sleep. I grabbed a Diet Coke, ate a nutritious breakfast of Zebra cakes and watermelon, sat down in front of The Colbert Report, and went to NewYorkTimes.com first thing instead of BabyCenter.

Anyone who's pregnant can tell you--that's a milestone. That's like being released from demonic possession and finding yourself once again able to think for yourself. And it feels good.

It's been a while since I've written, and that's mostly because there hasn't been a lot to say. I worked every day last week except for overnight Saturday (or Sunday morning), so I spent this week, as usual, trying to desperately schedule in more than four hours of sleep at a time. I met with my gastroenterologist on Thursday at noon, which is also the equivalent of about 3 o'clock in the morning to me, and sat half awake as he talked.

On Saturday, I got home from work at about 10AM. I crawled into bed with Jason and was in a deep sleep by 10:05.

During that sleep, I had another set of pregnancy-induced crazyass dreams. One--and I won't go into too much detail because it's pretty much disgusting and not nearly as nuanced with political references as my Dubya adventure--has stuck with me:

I'm driving to work, up a huge, winding hill, with Louie in my lap. We get into a car accident, and Louie finds himself trapped in the rubble. This magical circus man appears, and he has this big wheel with him, a la The Price is Right, minus the sparkles and Bob Barker:


He tells me that I have to spin the wheel to get Louie out of the rubble. So I'm spinning furiously, and I can see him start to pull himself out the harder I spin. But then it's too late, and he's sinking farther and farther down, and The Circus Man tells me I've lost him. Just as I'm about to fall into a state of deep despair, and only an inch of Louie's ear is left peaking out of the mangled steel, Circus Man changes his mind, and tells me it's not too late and TO SPIN, SPIN! So I spin with all my might, and out comes Louie, and then he's free and I run and scoop him up and shower him with kisses. Except the whole ordeal has taken a toll on my little perfect 5 pound puppy, and he now has only tiny nubs where his legs used to be. But it's all okay, because he's alive and that's all that matters.

And then I drive to work, with Louie and his nub-legs, and everyone at Channel 4 is so amazed by the story that they dedicate all the newscasts to my miracle dog, and Louie is suddenly, overnight the most famous creature in the world.

There's a lot more to that dream, including a world tour with Nubbin Boy and an entire sequence in which the previous scene is switched and Louie has to spin the wheel to get me out of rubble and I wind up with nubs for legs.

So, to make a long story short, I woke up from that dream and made Jason grab the thermometer, because that dream extended far beyond pregnancy insanity and had to be a fever dream, too. And I was right. I had a fever of 100, which isn't inherently a huge deal, but raised body temperatures during pregnancy can lead to birth defects, so Jason and I promptly freaked out.

After some calls to the doctor and a lot of Tylenol, I fell back asleep around 5 in the evening.

And I didn't wake up until 9am the next morning.

I don't even want to count how many hours of sleep that is, but I'm starting to think the fever was just my body's way of saying "Sleep, you crazy person!" because I haven't slept more than 4 hours at a time in about two months. Even on my days off, I find myself waking up in a panic at 1 in the morning because ohmygod why am I not writing the news???

Can you tell this schedule is starting to really, really get to me? Yeah. It really, truly is.

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Pregnancy dreams, breastfeeding, and George W. Bush's devil child

I've heard about this whole crazy-pregnancy dreams thing for a while, but last night was the first time I officially experienced it.

I have never had a "normal," simple, obvious dream. Never do they include school, or work, or romances with celebrities, or being nude in public. So for me to have a dream that I classify as "crazy" is saying something. I haven't had such intense, vivid dreams since my first time on Prednisone when I was 13, and I still, ten years later, remember every single color, texture, word, and emotion of those.

Last night (or, day, rather, since I sleep during the daylight and work overnight), included a string of these bizarre dreams. One, in particular, stands out.

My fiance and I buy a one-room cabin in the woods. It's bare, at best, with a moth-ball-ridden plaid couch and a leaky sink and drafty windows. We also buy a gun, to accompany us in our new real estate adventure, and put it next to the couch, which we decide will be our bed.

After one night of sleeping there, I know we've made a mistake (I think I originally thought it would be a good place for the baby--quiet, unadulterated by pop culture and a good place to breed a thinker). I'd spent the night sleeping on the inside of the couch, with Jason gripping the gun on my other side (he was terrified of the woods. Again, why our dream-selves moved there, who really knows).

The next day, a man and a woman come to visit us. They say they used to live in this house.

They know that I'm pregnant, and the woman tells us she just gave birth. For a few hours, we're friends. We sit on the plaid couch and she tells me all about labor, the ins and outs of the end of pregnancy, the glory of seeing your child for the first time.

Then they leave, and promise to return the next day.

When they return, something has changed. They aren't the friendly, woods-dwelling hippies they were the day before. They're moody, fidgety, and now they wear huge plaid shirts (the day before, the woman had been wearing a flowing, white dress, the man, flip flops and shorts).

The woman starts in on a story about how her child was conceived. Turns out, it doesn't belong to her male companion.

It belongs, she confesses, to George W. Bush.

And it isn't Dubya's love child. The former president raped her.

She's not especially upset telling me this, but her eyes well up for the next part.

She has given birth, she says, to a devil baby. She never outright says that Bush would then be the devil, but his spawn, well, it's nothing but evil.

Then she slowly, and reluctantly, eyes down and ashamed, unbuttons her plaid shirt.

Her breasts have been mutilated beyond recognition. Her nipples are gone, in their place are only huge, bleeding scabs.

I'm not scared by the sight, only fascinated. I had questions about breastfeeding, and this answers quite a few (namely that I no way in hell want to do it).

I ask her how this happened, and she says there's only one way to show me the havoc little George Jr. wrecks when he's feeding.

I then see another scene altogether, one I assume she's allowing me to view from her own thoughts.

And this telepathic vision is a scene from Jurassic Park. It's the one where the group sees the Velocorapter cages for the first time, and they get to witness a feeding.

A cow, strapped up in a harness, is slowly lowered into the cage. All I see is the intact, mooing cow disappear from sight. For just a few moments the tops of the caged trees rustle and shake, and then the harness is raised.

It's in shreds. And the cow is gone.

And then I woke up, and decided not to breastfeed.

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